Billing on Google Cloud

One of the biggest draws for many GCP customers is Google's competitive pricing models. Google Cloud Platform boasts a flexible billing system capable of meeting the needs of several billing scenarios. From centralized billing management to control systems that ensure budgets are not exceeded, the Google Cloud billing system is designed to empower users and facilitate transparency.

As with most other aspects of GCP, billing is viewed as a resource, with full API support and integrations with Cloud IAM. All costs are measured in terms of resource usage, making it easy to perform tasks such as financial forecasting and cost-benefit analysis. Much like IAM, billing can be managed on both the project and organization level. For large enterprises, this makes it possible to centralize billing and delegate payment management to a dedicated billing team.

Each Google Cloud service has a specific billing model based on that service's resources and usage. For example, on Compute Engine, resources include VM instances, disks, licensing for certain operating systems, networking, and images. Each of these resources carries a specific cost based on allocation. Where many Google Cloud resources offer a free tier, any resources used below the free tier threshold is subtracted from the total cost after that threshold is exceeded. Service billing models and any billing related features will be covered in later chapters.